City of the Dead

She swept aside formality, and he saw that though her face was worried, her eyes were clear.
    ‘What is it?’ he asked.
    She looked at him. ‘I have no doubt you know that my chief huntsman was arrested. They tell me he was plotting against me. Do you know what really happened?’
    ‘He is dead,’ said Huy. ‘But I am sure that the last thing in his heart was betrayal.’
    ‘I agree. But there is something else. My little sisters have been sent to the Northen Capital. Ay tells me it is for them to represent the pschent for the Opet festival there; but it is the first I have heard of the Northern Capital celebrating the Opet festival as well as here.’
    ‘The net is closing,’ said Huy.
    ‘There is more still,’ the queen continued, pacing up and down, hands fluttering, unable to stay still for a moment. ‘Ay has repeated his request for a marriage.’
    ‘What did you tell him?’
    ‘I asked for time.’
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘That I had none. He gave me five days.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘Nothing.An empty threat.’
    ‘What will you tell him when the time is up?’
    ‘That I would rather die than marry him.’
    Huy looked at her. ‘You must leave the Southern Capital.’
    ‘No. I will see my husband buried.’
    ‘You owe it to him not to join him in the grave. It is not a responsibility that is yours alone any more. You carry a god within you.’
    ‘A god should be able to take care of himself.’
    ‘When they are in us they need help. Their power is limited by the frame they inhabit.’
    The queen was silent, but she continued to look obstinate. ‘Do not teach me my duty,’ she said finally; and Huy knew that he had won.
    ‘We must make plans quickly,’ he said cautiously, after a pause.
    ‘If I survive, and if I find that the king has not, after all, been given the full honour due to him, and if one day I have power to avenge the indignity, I will have horses drag you five times found the limits of the city,’ she told him icily.
    ‘There must be a boat. Not one of the falcon ships. I doubt if we could trust the sailors anyway,’ said Huy, having shown her with his eyes that he had taken note of her threat.
    ‘It is too much that I must flee my own city like a criminal,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if I consent to go - and not return - they will let me do so according to my rank.’
    ‘No,’ said Huy. ‘They will not.’
    ‘Ay is my own grandfather!’
    ‘We must find a boat,’ repeated Huy. in the hands of someone we can trust.’
    ‘Who is there?’ said the queen.

    The embalmers had told Senseneb that her father would be ready for the great journey a month after the Opet festival - which still gave her fifty days in the house she had grown up in. Nevertheless, she had started to clear it, parting with most, regretfully bidding farewell to chairs, stools, papyrus rolls, tables, lamps, that she had known all her life. The things she could not bear to part with, Horaha’s medical equipment; the little statue of Imhotep — her father’s hero, the chief minister of the pharaoh Djoser and architect of the first great pyramid at Sakkara over a thousand years earlier; the images of the goddess Hathor, and of the gods Hor-Pa-Khred and Thoth, together with the best furniture and the most loved and important scrolls, she arranged to have shipped south to Napata. Although her future was uncertain, excitement and even pleasure had invaded the sadness and pessimism which had cast a shadow over her since her father’s death. If she could not avenge it, she thought, she could perhaps at least vindicate his life. And perhaps - though this was a hope she did not dare bring fully into her heart yet — her own future would not now be as bleak as she had assumed. She tried not to let herself think about Huy, though already she had started to call him her brother to herself. Her winged heart flew away from her to him, and her body became strong and fluid, like the River, when he came into her thoughts.
    Unconsciously, she had begun to take leave of the house already. Once a room was emptied, its character departed immediately, and it was as if it had never had anything to do with her life, or only formed part of a half-remembered dream. Soon the whole place would be like that. What she would regret most would be the garden. Horaha and her mother had spent years creating it, and the medicinal herbs which grew there were thought by some to be the most important collection in the Black Land. As